A Beginner's Deep Dive Guide to Entra Passkeys

In my experience, for most basic services, Passkeys are absolute overkill: Your ability to recover your account without too much hassle usually beats having a key explicitely tied to physical hardware (even worse, your phone that you carry around in public). Besides, passkeys are also often used by companies like Microsoft to peddle their apps, because of course you have to have specific apps for it.

Makes me all feel like passkeys are largely a convenient security excuse for vendor lock-in and siphoning personal information. OTP-Generators seem to be more generally applicable and less phone or company-bound.

"Something you have"/"device bound" is not what I want if I don't control it. In the case of passkeys, I don't have access to the private key, so I consider that not controllable by me.

I'm happy to be wrong if I am able to extract and import the private keys (it's what I do with TOTP now), but my understanding is designers of passkeys explicitly don't want users access to their own privkeys so they can tie them to physical objects. I get that, I don't want that.

So passkeys are not something I'll ever use or useful or convenient to me.

Passkeys are a solid idea in theory - in practice they are a confusing mess. Basic users are incredibly confused by them. My recommendation still continues to be a very strong password + app based MFA.

I sometimes consider the number of man-hours wasted every year by companies (such as Amazon and Dropbox) that repeatedly offer to convert passwords to passkeys, despite having already been declined (once, or even dozens or hundreds of times).

wordy ad

whatever it takes to kill sms mfa.

For a company this may be a good idea, but for consumers this is a nightmare. It will be so easy to get locked out of your account.

Good point.

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